archive for "Politics"
Don’t Panic 15th, April 2013
Stories release us from the limitations of our ordinary lives. They process the complexities of existence, they entertain, they counsel and console. And sometimes, they save us. I was fourteen and the world was going to end. Four minutes, that was all we’d have, and then we’d be atomised: nothing between us and the bomb except a stupid understairs cupboard or a stupid kitchen table. Every time the Soviet Union and the States went head to head over Afghanistan, say, or Nicaragua, it meant High Wycombe [...]
Fashion! (Turn To The Left) 20th, March 2013
I will not lie, I love dressing up. I love colour and texture; I’m a sucker for embellishment, embroidery and beads. I love over-the-knee boots and necklaces that look like breastplates. In my less confident days I dressed to be ignored (a face-covering fringe as a teenager, dark colours so I could blend in), but I don’t feel like that any more. Dressing up is fun, and (teenage angst aside) we’ve always done it. But fashion has a shameful, albeit hugely successful, history as a means [...]
Writers’ Wives 6th, November 2012
In recent weeks we’ve been treated to two spousal accounts of what it is to live with a novelist. There’s this, from Deborah Orr (wife to Booker shortlisted Will Self) and now these comments from Ian Rankin’s wife that, during the most trying period of each novel’s creation, the role of his family is “Chiefly… trying to get out from under his feet… it’s sort of staying out of his way while he gets on with it.” This sounds like a pretty good deal: having [...]
something for the ladies 30th, April 2012
Imagine my surprise when I opened my copy of The Bookseller on Friday and discovered a new category of fiction: Intelligent Women’s Reads. I’ll just run that by you again: Intelligent Women’s Reads. Now, I’m going to be optimistic here and operate under the assumption that the adjective is being applied to the books, rather than the women. If not, we have a whole new problem to deal with. What are intelligent women’s reads? Well they aren’t ‘Glitz’, as that has a category of its [...]
Free Nelson Mandela! (and other arguments for equal marriage) 15th, March 2012
My mom brought me something fabulous the other day, a relic of my past she’d found when going through a box of old letters. Here it is: It’s a badge I wore pinned to the lapels of a large and shabby secondhand coat towards the end of the eighties. In common with many (but not enough) British people at the time, I opposed Apartheid – a particularly sharp issue for me, born in Cape Town to a South African mom. I won’t claim that [...]
ain’t gonna work for you no more 12th, February 2012
There’s been a fair amount of guff talked over the past week about the monarchy and its relationship with Britain. It comes, of course, as the Queen celebrates her Diamond Jubilee and – to someone well-versed in the rhetoric of the 1977 Silver Jubilee – it sometimes seems that little has changed in the last thirty-five years. I am not a monarchist. I long to be a citizen, rather than a subject. I long to be able, in this democracy, to vote for my head [...]